ISTP News

We are delighted to announce the next colloquium talk of this semester. Prof. David Bresch from ETH Zurich’s Department of Environmental Systems Science will elaborate on the challenges in reporting climate resilience and adopting the Climate-related Disclosures recommendations.

Our next colloquium talk will take place online on Tuesday, 13th October 2020, at 5pm. The invited guest speaker, Dr. Bjarne Steffen will talk about the role of finance in climate policy. Mitigating dangerous climate change requires a rapid transition of economies towards low-carbon technologies. Bjarne Steffen will elaborate on the interplay between interest rates and the politics of emissions trading.

Our first colloquium talk for the Autumn Semester 2020 will take place online on Tuesday, 29th September 2020, at 17:15 - 18:30. The invited guest speaker, Prof. Marco Mazzotti from the ETH Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, will elaborate on several aspects related to the deployment of Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCU and CCS) systems, which play a central role in political debates, technological efforts and scientific developments around climate change.

The legal mechanism that people have been counting on to stop climate change has been politically unpopular for years. Amazingly, climate policy experts are now becoming confident that we can end CO2 emissions. An insightful study by the ISTP member Prof. Anthony Patt advocates that there are policy instruments that do fit climate change and are politically feasible. It suggests a roadmap for solving climate change that focuses first on supporting new technologies, and then on bringing down emissions.

Climate change mitigation has been politicized in many countries, potentially blocking the introduction of climate policies. Publicly funded green investment banks are one policy instrument that mobilizes private finance into national opportunities. ETH researchers incl. ISTP member Prof. Tobias Schmidt analysed the parliamentary discourse behind the design of two cases of green investment banks. Their results produce observations allowing to develop four propositions for further investigation.

The Swiss Environmental Panel explores public opinion in Switzerland in relation to environmental preferences and behaviour, and changes therein. It constitutes a panel survey which ETH conducts in cooperation with the Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN). The full report of the Wave 2 focusing on climate, climate change and climate policy is now available.

A number of conditions must be met in order for utilization-focused policy advice to become a reality on a wider scale. Researchers from various institutes, including ISTP Member Prof. David Kaufmann, propose a six-point checklist for developing effective policy advice. They argue that in addition to invest in science communication for the general public and politicians, a specific form of policy advice, that is, policy-prescriptive evidence-based information, should become available. 

A new article on political populism and public support for climate mitigation by Dr. Robert A. Huber from University of Salzburg, PhD Candidate at ETH Zurich Lukas Paul Fesenfeld and ETH Prof. Thomas Bernauer was published in Climate Policy. Their study assesses whether populism could affect citizen support for climate mitigation policies. It also investigates to what extent frames about elite responsiveness are important heuristics for individuals´ preferences concerning climate policies.

In July 2020, Université Laval (in Quebec, Canada) will host an International Student Summit on Climate, aimed at young university students or recent graduates from across the world. A call for applications is being launched in January 2020 and the deadline to submit an application will be on February 12, 2020, at midnight (Quebec time, Canada).